posted on 05 Nov 2020

How Many Miles to Babylon? by Jennifer Johnston

Sometimes a book will catch your eye and you realise that inexplicably, despite being familiar with both it and the author, somehow you have never been prompted to explore further. This happened to me recently with Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? I suddenly realised that not only had I never even looked at this highly acclaimed novel, I had never read a word she has written, despite her being widely regarded as one of Ireland’s finest writers. She has published nearly twenty novels and half-a-dozen plays and turned ninety this year.

Published in 1974, How Many Miles to Babylon? was her third novel. In its delicacy, its sureness of touch, its evocation of historical period and especially its compression – it is only 150 pages – it reminds me a little of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work. Something about its oblique methods also remind me of Fitzgerald. Johnston sets out to write of the emotional, political and psychological damage of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy – the long legacy of English colonialism in Ireland – but does so by writing of something else entirely: the trenches of the First World War. That is a very Fitzgeraldish approach.

The novel opens in Ireland on the estate of the aristocratic Moore family. Alec Moore, delicate, coddled, kept apart, is the only son of emotionally distant parents. He is able but has been schooled at home by a succession of largely Jesuit tutors and has little to fall back on but the values of his class and time and his own moral sense.

As he grows up he becomes friends with Jerry, a stable boy on the estate, who belongs to what Alec’s mother regards as a disreputable family – working class, Irish, drinkers and almost certainly nationalist. The kind of people, she believes, who in just a few years time will help burn the Anglo-Irish ruling class out of its ‘Big Houses’. She forbids Alec to have anything further to do with the boy.

As war breaks out she becomes convinced that her son should volunteer – that a glittering and honourable career as an officer awaits him and that he must fulfil the duties of leadership for which his class and breeding have destined him. ‘Dulce et Decorum…’ she says at one point in answer to his objections – it is sweet and fitting…to die for one’s country. And she is not quoting the line from Horace’s ode ironically, as it became used after the war and especially following publication of Wilfred Owen’s great anti-war poem of the same title in 1920. No, she says this to Alec with an icy calm and a wintry smile and she means it literally.

‘Such nonsense’ his father says of the drive to war, but he is a feeble and melancholy man, far too ineffectual to oppose his wife. And eventually we learn the reason for this. He is not Alec’s father, his mother bitterly reveals. Not only can he not stand up for his son, he couldn't even father him. Whether true or not, Alec’s mother refuses to reveal who the father was.

It is this final rift in the family that drives Alec into the army. If Jerry is being called up then he too will enlist and they will leave together on the next day’s train.

In a sense, Alec enlists to escape his family and to assert his personal despair. But Jerry joins up for very different reasons: being trained to fight in England’s war will equip him to fight for Ireland – what could be more fitting.

The scene then shifts briefly to the military camp where they are both being trained – Alec, the volunteer, as an officer and gentleman, and Jerry as a conscripted infantryman. Their next stop, just weeks away, will be Flanders.

And it is in the hell of the frontline trenches that the social divisions of class, culture and background that separate the two men reach a startling and emotionally powerful conclusion.

Some critics say of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels that their real mystery lies in how she accomplishes so much with such brevity. ‘As soon as I finished it I read it again to try and find out how it works', is not an unusual comment for reviewers to make. I had precisely this feeling on finishing Johnston’s novel. It is simple, its language plain and economical, its structure straightforward and easy to follow. In many ways it is the most conventional kind of fiction imaginable. On the other hand, what it tells us of the trenches is both appallingly familiar and newly revealing. And for such a bleakly powerful book there is also a huge amount to enjoy – the descriptions of Alec’s home, the Irish landscape, the rhythms of farm life, horses and hunting, and of the natural world are deeply felt and evocative. And if this sounds as if you will already be familiar with such terrain from Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, then I can only tell you that somehow, in Johnston’s hands, it emerges freshly minted.

I’ve no idea how this small masterpiece compares to her other work and I’m a little reluctant to read more in case of disappointment. What an extraordinary little novel.

Highly recommended.

 

Alun Severn

November 2020